Politics & Governance / Public Policy / Immigration & Refugee Policy

The Anti-Slavery Lie: How States Weaponize Human Rights

Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery

Annie Hill

When governments announce heroic wars on modern slavery, who actually ends up in handcuffs? In Trafficking Rhetoric: Race, Migration, and the Making of Modern-Day Slavery, Dr. Annie Hill, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, exposes a dark institutional paradox: the very rhetoric used to save trafficking victims is weaponized to build brutal deportation regimes. Dr. Hill spends a decade decoding state bureaucracy, public monuments, and fabricated crime statistics, revealing how the UK hijacked the moral legacy of nineteenth-century abolitionism to justify aggressive border crackdowns. This breakdown tracks how a baseline of just 71 confirmed cases was inflated into a fabricated national crisis of 67,000 hidden slaves, unleashing xenophobic public surveillance campaigns and covert police raids where zero traffickers were convicted, yet hundreds of vulnerable migrant women were jailed and deported. From the dismantling of the Colston statue to the devastating human toll of the Windrush scandal, this presentation pulls back the curtain on the dual torque of state power: celebrating historical virtue in the light while executing racial violence in the shadows. Watch to deconstruct how modern statecraft manufactures moral panic and learn to see past the ethical smoke screens of modern policy.